“Let me just look around,” she said, cutting the ring interviewer off at the knees. He wanted Katie Taylor to say something inspiring and momentous worthy of the night but instead, as she’s always preferred, she acted rather than spoke. The lights went up and she drank in Croke Park, glistening now like a palace. Hers, finally and eternally.
She beat Flora Pili here, as expected, in one of the most straightforward fights of her career. The 29-year-old Frenchwoman landed a couple of good punches in the second round and had Taylor back-pedalling under the weight of some heavy blows in the seventh. But otherwise, Taylor’s last night of work in the ring was a spotless one.
The judges gave her a unanimous decision in the end, two of them calling it in her favour by 100-90 and one making it 98-91. She controlled the fight, keeping Pili at a distance of her pleasing, picking her off with ramrod left jabs and whipping her right to the challenger’s head at will. Pili was strong on her feet and aggressive in her advances. But it’s hard to hit a ghost.
Time and again, Taylor nipped in and out of Pili’s spaces, offering a target that was gone by the time the Frenchwoman’s glove got there. It was like watching a live scrumping, with Taylor as a kid in an orchard whipping apples and leaving only a bouncing branch behind her. Pili did all she could but Taylor’s speed of evasion made it impossible to see her, never mind catch her.
All the while, the 80,000 crowd in Croke Park ate it up. She made it the perfect night for them, never once scaring them into thinking that anything other than the ending everyone expected was on the cards. They came to see her finish her career as the greatest to ever do it. She didn’t disappoint.
This crowd was all Ireland. You had families and couples and gangs of girls and bands of boys, all drawn here like pilgrims. You had Saturday night girlos in Saturday night hair, tottering down Jones’s Road. Fellas in Yupbro tracksuits, dudes in chinos with jumpers knotted about their shoulders. Travellers and poshos, grannies and grandkids, Gah heads, rugby heads, soccer heads, all faiths and none. All here for Katie.
On a helpfully warm night, it all felt deeply surreal at times inside the stadium. People were running into each other and the first thing they’d do is gesture down to the pitch and up to the stands, as if they were all thinking the same thing. Eight thousand different versions of: “This is wild. Isn’t this wild?’
And it was. There was Westlife belting out a couple of tunes. There was Grace and Zombie and endless Olé, Olé, Olés. There were cans of G&T and Smirnoff Ice in the seats and the strongest smell of weed Croke Park has ever known wafting through the stands. It was a Saturday night in Dublin and the place felt alive.
The ringwalk was a Broadway show all by itself. Taylor was the only performer of the night to come in at the corner of the Hogan and Davin Stands, strolling along a KatieWalk all of her own. By the time she reached the ring, the place was fizzing in every direction and fireworks were going off right around the stadium roof.
The thought did occur that this was all being presented as a fait accompli, as if defeat was so far out of the question as to be blasphemy to even suggest. It’s hard to remember a sporting event that ever had the fireworks display before the action kicked off. Were they tempting fate here?
From the ding of the opening bell, any of that kind of worry was washed away. Taylor won a cagey first round, never allowing Pili to enter her postcode, stitching her own shots when she wanted to. Though Pili willed herself into the fight in the second, Taylor put clear water between them from the third to the sixth. Pili couldn’t land anything clean, so Katie knew she only had to find her range three or four times a round to take it.
She ended the whole thing laughing. By the 10th round, she was far enough ahead to enjoy herself and even then, it wasn’t until the final 10 seconds of her career that she took the chance of letting loose. She got in tight with Pili and, as if thinking she may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, indulged herself in one last tear-up.
The pair traded blows from there until the last bell, whizzing punches at each other as if somebody had suddenly pressed fast-forward. The final bell went and she burst out laughing, as if she had tickled herself pink by that one final flurry.
And that was that. All that remained was for them to announce the result, the stadium to explode one last time and Katie Taylor to ask for that one last look around. She gazed upon the spectacle she had alone had conceived and created, no worlds left to conquer.
Doing it her own way to the last.